Philip Marlowe

In 2011 the BBC broadcast its ‘Classic Chandler’ radio season, which amongst documentaries and dramas devoted to writer Raymond Chandler also produced adaptations of his novels featuring Toby Stephens as the iconic private investigator Philip Marlowe. In a nice touch they concluded with a dramatisation of Poodle Springs, a fragment of a new Marlowe novel that Chandler was working on at his death in 1959 and which 30 years later Robert B. Parker expanded with commendable fidelity (I reviewed the book here).

Toby Stephens as Philip Marlow (image copyright: BBC)

Apart from the first and last, the adaptations were not broadcast in chronological order – I hope to review them all as time allows.